David Ehrlich

Athena effectively taps into the class, racial, and religious angers of modern France, which it sees as a powder keg that’s just waiting for the right spark to explode, but the film’s broad saga of brothers in crisis is so thin and symbolic that any deeper connection to the real world is sacrificed at the altar of intensity. An intensity that resists psychology, muffles sociopolitical context, and eventually swallows itself whole.

With “Bardo,” Iñárritu delivers a cartoonishly indulgent film about the fact that he makes cartoonishly indulgent films — a rootless epic about a rootless man who’s been unmoored by his own self-doubt.

TÁR is a provocation full of slow-motion suckerpunches and the driest of laughs (even its accented title is a knowingly pretentious in-joke) and yet Field seems as uninterested in trolling his liberal audience as he is in patronizing them.

Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume.

The genius of Legge’s design, and why his debut works as more than just a cute little curio despite its thinness, is that it mines a sneaky emotionality from the bedrock of the film-within-a-film structure.

Luck is a terrible idea for a movie, executed poorly, and by someone who used to know better. The best thing I can say about the finished product is that, unlike most forms of bad luck, this one is wonderfully easy to avoid altogether.

Pitt’s stardom has never been more obvious, and it shines bright enough here for everything else to get lost in the glare.

This super-cheap Netflix Original is so determined to satisfy the algorithm that it would lack any coherent sense of self if not for the fact that it was chiefly designed as a star vehicle for Disney Channel grad Sofia Carson — but there’s something rather stubbornly honest about the heartbeat of desperation that thrums below its Walmart veneer.

One Man Dies a Million Times” might be slow cinema writ large — its story told through erosion, and with all the velocity of a famine — but the half-imagined past that it remembers is coming for us at the speed of real life.

Told with no frills, less personality, and just enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), Howard’s serviceable “Thirteen Lives” is a far cry from the kind of souped-up spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries might create out of this material. And yet, its let the story speak for itself approach feels misjudged in the aftermath of a documentary so rich with big personalities, knotted with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.

There’s such a warm buoyancy to My Donkey, My Lover & I — such a well-earned, rejuvenating naturalness to the way that Vignol addresses the insecurities and frustrations that keep middle-aged women from loving themselves — that it eventually hits with the same oomph of a film that takes itself far more seriously.

It doesn’t hurt that Peele’s latest boasts some of the most inspired alien design since H.R. Giger left his mark on the genre, or that Kaluuya’s eyes remain some of Hollywood’s most special effects, as “Nope” gets almost as much mileage from their weariness as “Get Out” squeezed from their clarity. It’s through them that “Nope” searches for a new way of seeing, returns the Haywoods to their rightful place in film history, and creates the rare Hollywood spectacle that doesn’t leave us looking for more.

The algorithmic results don’t reflect well on the Russo brothers’ directing chops — their monumental spandex operas seldom required and never displayed the kind of muscular imagination needed to stage Michael Bay-like fight sequences — but The Gray Man is even more damning for Netflix itself, particularly so far as it epitomizes the streamer’s penchant for producing mega-budget movies that feel like glorified deepfakes of classic multiplex fare.

That it’s able to split the difference between Nicholas Sparks and “Nell” with any measure of believability is a testament to Daisy Edgar-Jones’ careful performance as Kya Clark.

It tells a simple but epic story against the backdrop of a well-realized fantasy world, it does so at a measured pace that provokes the imagination rather than pummeling it into submission, and it stays on course by leveraging spectacular action (highlighted by several blistering pirate fights and a PG-rated kaiju brawl) into an effective fable about the perils of inherited prejudice.

If Love and Thunder is more of the same, it’s also never less than that. The MCU may still be looking for new purpose by the time this movie ends, but the mega-franchise can take solace in the sense that Thor has found some for himself.

Hulu’s dull and exasperatingly basic “The Princess” wastes a slew of talent on a straight-to-streaming cheapo so undercooked that it feels like an AMC psy-op designed to make you run to the nearest multiplex and beg for a ticket to whatever’s showing next.

Clara Sola is fleshed with the feeling that love and repression are braided together. It’s bound by the sense that we smother the things most precious to us in order to keep them from getting away.

It’s a shame that Brian and Charles plays things safe, as Archer’s naturally irreverent debut only becomes easier to invest in during its more outlandish moments.

Even when the jokes miss the mark or the central mystery seems too easily solved, Vengeance is sustained by the question of what its characters mean to each other; a question asked sweetly but shrouded by an ever-growing darkness that allows the film to wander into dangerous territory by the end.

Lightyear is the first movie that Pixar has released in theaters since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal that would probably feel more exciting if Lightyear wasn’t also the first Pixar movie since the start of the pandemic that feels like it only belongs on Disney Plus.

For a movie so preoccupied with the choices that people can make, Spiderhead invariably makes the least interesting ones available to it, which is a serious problem for a movie streaming on a platform whose subscribers are never far removed from the choice to be watching something else instead.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

Hustle may not be the greatest redemption story ever told about second chances, third careers, and the hard work of triumphing over your worst tendencies, but the film holds fast enough to the courage of its convictions to feel like it’s got skin in the game.

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, Showing Up is transformed by its finishing touches.

Beautiful as Dhont’s eye for detail can be, and vital as his willingness to explore the unbearably tender pockets of adolescence often proves here, Close still finds its sensitive — if sometimes borderline sadistic — young filmmaker defaulting to universal pain whenever he fears that more personal feelings may be too poignantly ethereal to see on camera.

An energetic yet hopelessly convoluted espionage thriller that doesn’t tell a story so much as it chronically bumps into one. ... Lee’s debut is little more than a chattering Pez dispenser full of plot twists.